BIOGRAPHY – The Extended Version cont.

Africa's Homeless Widows

June 16, 2004

Women feed Africa. They grow 80 percent of the continent's
food, yet the land they cultivate is not theirs. Women own
only 1 percent of the land in sub-Saharan Africa. Tradition
says that when a man dies, his property passes to his adult
sons or brothers. The widow and her children are often
evicted and left destitute.

These inheritance customs have long taken land away from
those who cultivated it and helped to impoverish the most
vulnerable women and children. But AIDS now magnifies the
harm. Since men are dying younger, they often leave no sons
old enough to inherit their property and thus save the
family from homelessness - so more widows are evicted.
In some countries, discrimination is in the law. In
Swaziland, for example, women are lifelong legal minors and
cannot own property. Many countries place barriers to
women's inheritance of property. But even in places like
Ghana and Zambia, where the formal law protects women to
some degree, the dispossession of widows is widespread.
Changing laws, then, is only one step in fighting the
practice.

Traditionally, women lack rights but are supposed to be
protected by their fathers, and then by their husbands. And
brothers who inherit a dead man's property are supposed to
assume responsibility for his widow and orphans. But
increased desperation, fueled largely by AIDS, has made a
great number of families disregard this obligation.
Instead, brothers often violently evict the widow.
Sometimes a widow returns from a mourning ceremony to find
someone else's lock on her door.
Reforming inheritance practices has been a focus of the
women's rights movement in Africa since it began about 20
years ago. Campaigners have been able to change some legal
codes, but such changes have brought little help. Laws
often specifically exempt family matters or do not apply to
marriages outside the formal legal system, which is most of
them. National laws are rarely known, let alone enforced,
in rural Africa. A desperate widow is unlikely to challenge
her husband's relatives, who may remain her only hope for
handouts.

Helping widows requires more than rewriting legal codes.
Educational programs are necessary to encourage men to
question the commonly held belief that if women are allowed
to inherit property, wives will be enticed to kill their
husbands. Women's groups have had some success working with
tribal chiefs and training mediators; they have founded
groups of village women who counsel new widows on ways to
protect their homes and guard their belongings while
mourning. Governments have left the task of village-level
education to women's organizations, but these lack
resources. It should be a government's job not only to
improve its laws, but also to ensure that they are upheld.